Growing up is when birthday cakes suddenly last a whole week instead of being gone by morning and your old dog has been replaced with a springy puppy. The house is quiet and your parents no longer need to drive you home from friends' houses. You're eighteen. You plan what piercings to get behind your parent's backs because you can decide that for yourself now, and the sibling tattoos you always joked about become the thing you hope will bind you all together again after everyone has left.

Being the youngest kid is unfair. People associate your existence as the one who got all the attention growing up, but it was short-lived. The wonder of Christmas only lasts until your oldest sister unwraps the facade. Your siblings get to feed off of you for an extended childhood while yours is cut short from their gluttony. Parents get older to you faster. You see the pictures of their youth that you're too young to have remembered. I didn’t grow up with the same parents my siblings did. My parents are 58 and 61. They never bothered with the “PTO mom” thing or the field trip supervisor because they had done it all before. The neighborhood 4th of July parties are ignored. They're in bed by 9pm on New Year’s. And while you know it’s selfish to have wanted more when they already gave you so much, you still never got their youth. Your pleading to jump with your mom on the trampoline is shrugged off with a simple “I’m too old for that kind of thing.” They’re stuck in the past yet physically stay unshielded by present time. Bodies warping yet their mind stays the same until eventually that too will fade. But you love them, that’s your family. 

Your parents resent their parents yet can’t see how they are exactly like them. The one time you pointed it out your mother cried and you felt like the bad guy. Maybe one day your children will force that realization on you too. They brought you into the world on accident after settling with 3 kids and refuse to see how I couldn’t be the only selfish one. I know I’m a brat, but I’m still a kid. One that has been forced to grow up too quickly to keep up with the fast-paced maturity of my surroundings. New York City, Cincinnati, and Indiana all house the siblings I used to share a home with. Too far to make weekend trips and too expensive to fly home for anything but a holiday. And sometimes when they come home they bring a partner with them, someone entirely new and you can’t wait to get out and experience everything on your own because you know you're getting left behind, but you’ve also been chasing since your first steps and you feel so tired. And scared. How do you leave the place you've always known? How do you live up to the lives they’re living? Right now there’s an excuse for your late start, but every attempt to live up to your own expectations has been shattered, so what if the rest of your life is as dull and shadowed by their spotlight too? Are your interests really your interests, or just admiration? Do you want to be successful for yourself, or just to surpass them?

Why make everything into a competition? Is it just because it’s all you have ever set for yourself-- because you know how it will turn out? You have learned that if you acknowledge your accomplishments over theirs it’s obnoxious. Uncalled for. Vain. And all of that’s true. You know not to make your inner thoughts public to them, and that you shouldn't feel this way, but then why do you? You’re stuck as this thought snowballs. Repeating and cycling with every adaptation to the lives you used to be a part of, but now feel as though you’re watching through a screen.

It isn’t bad to have these feelings or you wouldn’t have them. Some things are better left unsaid, should be kept inside to fester, and that lesson --like all others-- was learned entirely too early.